The Rehearsal was one of the best TV series of 2022, not to mention one of the most innovative and fresh shows in recent memory. Nathan Fielder’s follow-up to Nathan for You consists of everyday people being helped out by Fielder, to deal with difficult conversations or life situations throughout the use of simulation of said occasions. The show builds elaborate sets almost identical to the person’s real life environments to practice and recreate with actors the upcoming circumstances to be faced. Fielder designs complex decision trees as to engage in every possible outcome of situations, most times the information given to the actors is recollected without the client’s knowledge of it.
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The show has been frequently compared to Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, which is having its 15th anniversary. The iconic film deals with Caden Cotard, a theater director (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) who begins work on a massive-scale production committed to recreating reality as closely as possible, eventually blurring the lines between reality and fiction. Both panned and praised, Kaufman continued his interest in the art of representation and nontraditional meta-narratives explored in his previous scripts for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Both works by Fielder and Kaufman employ the concept of rehearsal as a means to achieving better interpersonal interactions and understanding of the true self respectively. While both are pieces of postmodern art, the former’s final result is an absurdist docu-comedy, the latter’s is a complex, at times unintelligible, depressing and jaw-dropping insight into an artist’s search for meaning at the intersection between his personal, professional, and creative lives. In light of The Rehearsal’s success, it’s worth revisiting what made Synecdoche, New York the modern classic it is today.
Life in (and as) Theater
Sony Pictures
After being left by his wife (Catharine Keener), Cotard begins an adaptation of his life through theater. He acquires a gigantic warehouse where he brings together a massive amount of actors and asks them to help him create something committed with reality, to make it as close to it.
Throughout history, artists have drawn from autobiographies, taking inspiration from their personal lives to create, sometimes being loose with the facts and letting imagination run its course. Others make a hybrid mix of fact and fiction in equal fashion, while some value accuracy and faithfulness to reality above all else. Theatrical performance, due to its nature, involves repetition, and it will always find itself diverging from time to time. Caleb becomes obsessed with deleting this from the equation; he wishes to make something that through rehearsing becomes identical to life.
HBO
This same notion is applied in The Rehearsal, but in Kaufman’s film the seemingly coming execution never arrives, fiction becomes reality and the rehearsing is life itself. The director becomes so consumed by his work and obsessed with the notion of what’s real that when his actors or people on the street ask him for a premiere date he replies that the work is not ready yet, even if it’s been 17 years since they began rehearsing.
The neurotic director is trying to find himself, or his “true self,” through representation, in the romantic notion that maybe art can find a cure for the human condition. The question then arises: If art reflects life and life has now become art, what is real life anymore?
The Meaning of Synecdoche, New York: Simulacra and Simulation
French philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 philosophical treatise, Simulacra and Simulation is seemingly one of the biggest inspirations for the film and Fielder’s body of work. Simulacra refers to copies that had no original or have diverted far now from the original to become their own. Simulation is the imitation of a real life system over time.
In his imitation of life, Caleb develops aspects of his personal life simultaneously, with thousands of actors (and real life people in his life) portraying events of his day to day. The film still shows him dealing with real-life situations such as having to go to his parents’ funerals or assuming the work and identity of a woman that is cleaning his ex-wife’s apartment. These situations are portrayed in his production, but he can never escape the fact they are a representation. The Simulation, growing year by year, eventually becomes a bigger part of reality than reality itself, thus developing into Simulacra.
The Rehearsal is Simulacra itself, as the practices with actors being part of the show are as much a reality as the one Fielder’s clients will eventually have to face. The very word ‘synecdoche’ hints at the meaning here, suggesting that it’s a mistake to confuse a part of something (art) with the whole thing (life).
Fear of Death, Psychosis, and Rehearsal as Coping
Synecdoche, New York is metaphorically meaningful about many things, two of them being fear of death and psychosis. In one scene, Hoffman’s character yells at his ex-wife’s best friend for having his four-year-old daughter, who left with them for Berlin, become the first child to have a full body tattoo (absurdly appearing in a magazine, which is how Caleb finds out). She replies that the girl is no longer four — she is 11.
Cotard’s immersion into his Simulacra has taken him apart from the real world which fuels his play; his perception of what’s real is now altered. Whenever he reads about his daughter and ex-wife’s life in Berlin, they speak in his mind with a German accent, and have entirely forgotten him.
HBO
As the film advances, his insecurities begin to cloud his perception, and he only seems clear-headed when engaging with his work. His growing psychosis is made clear through his name, which is an allusion to Cotard’s syndrome, a delusion in which a person believes that they are already dead. This works perfectly with the notions of Jungian psychology which Kaufman has stated to be a major inspiration of his work.
From the very first scenes, Caleb is extremely concerned about his health, but as the movie advances it’s never clear if these worries are real or delusions. By the end of the film, many years have passed, surely more than a few decades, and Cotard is still alive. In his fear of death, he created a palace for life, a never-ending rehearsal of things, a way to emend the mistakes of reality by repeating them through a controlled fiction.
Synecdoche, New York Is a Comedy Rehearsing a Tragedy
Nathan Fielder poses the same idea of controlling reality to a much more light-hearted and positive effect, which is the betterment of human lives, while Hoffman’s character does it to find meaning to his existence. In both cases, the concepts of repetition, rehearsal, and simulation work as an antidote to hardships in life, spontaneity, and surprises. As such, there is uncomfortable and surreal humor to be found in the believable make-believe.
They both seek to find a cure to complicated parts of the human experience that make us who we are through systematization and perfection, but both are ultimately unattainable. In Fielder’s show, not everything goes as expected, and Nathan ends up making ethically questionable decisions in order to consummate his original goal, while in Synecdoche, Cotard’s vision is never fulfilled and ends up in tragedy.
These two productions try to find an antidote to complicated things, but end up revealing that no matter how much preparation or amends one might try to seek, these hurdles are always bound to appear and to be confined to life’s unpredictable turns.
